Oracle Blog

Openstack with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM

The OpenStack Summit has been an exciting event. We announced the Oracle OpenStack Distribution with support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, and support included with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Premier Support at no additional cost. The announcement was well received by our customers and partners. We’re pleased to continue the Oracle tradition of translating our enterprise experience into community contributions as we’ve done with Linux and Xen. Oracle is committed to ensuring choice for both our partners and customers.

A preview of OpenStack distribution (Havana) is now available on oracle.com for Oracle Linux (controller + compute) and Oracle VM (compute). We will follow this up with the production (GA) release in the next several months, including an update to IceHouse and later Juno. (whitepaper)

An OpenStack distribution contains several components that can be grouped into 2 major buckets (a) controller components, such as keystone, horizon, glance, cinder,.... (b) compute components such as nova and neutron. We provide support for the controller components on top of Oracle Linux and as part of Oracle Linux Premier Support. We provide support for the compute components on top of either Oracle Linux or Oracle VM (as part of Premier Support for both products).

By adding the Oracle OpenStack Distribution to Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, we can provide integrated support for all components in the stack including applications, database, middleware, guest OS, host OS, virtualization, and OpenStack – plus servers and storage. Our experience attacking the world’s toughest enterprise workloads means we focus on OpenStack stability, availability, performance, debugging and diagnostics. Oracle OpenStack customers and partners can immediately benefit from advanced features like Ksplice and DTrace from Oracle Linux and the hardening, testing, performance and stability of Oracle VM.

If you have chosen an OpenStack distribution other than Oracle’s, rest assured. Oracle will not attempt to force you to choose our OpenStack distribution by withholding support; we will provide the same high quality Oracle Linux and Oracle VM support no matter which OpenStack distribution you choose.

Furthermore, Oracle will continue to collaborate with Oracle’s OpenStack partners validating with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. Our goal remains the same: jointly deliver great solutions and support experience for our mutual customers. We also look forward to working with other vendors to certify networking, storage, hypervisor and other plugins into the Oracle OpenStack Distribution.

Finally, we plan to follow a development model similar to the approach we use with Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Our development work is focused on contributing upstream to the OpenStack community and we will pick up new releases of OpenStack after testing and validation.

It is an exciting time for OpenStack developers and users. We are thrilled that Oracle and our customers are part of it!

About

Wim Coekaerts is the Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering for Oracle. He is responsible for Oracle's complete desktop to data center virtualization product line and the Oracle Linux support program.